Business
Trump Bitcoin Conference fundraiser tickets top out at $844,600 for Nashville soiree
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Former U.S. President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump attends a campaign event in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S., June 22, 2024.
Shannon Stapleton | Reuters
Former President Donald Trump will headline a campaign fundraiser in Nashville on the sidelines of the Bitcoin Conference, where the top ticket is going for $844,600 per person.
According to an invitation shared with CNBC, the July 27 event will coincide with Trump’s expected keynote speech at the conference, the country’s biggest gathering of cryptocurrency fans.
The top-tier tickets, which include a seat at a roundtable with Trump, are priced at the maximum donation amount permitted for individuals to give to Trump and the Republican party’s largest joint fundraising committee, known as the Trump 47 Committee.
A next level down includes a photo with the former president at $60,000 per person or $100,000 per couple, according to the invitation.
Trump signed on to headline the Music City Center gathering shortly before he survived an attempted assassination on July 13.
A spokesman for the Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment on his Nashville appearances.
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In recent months, Trump has positioned himself as the pro-crypto candidate for president, a reversal from his previous stance during his time in the White House.
In April, Trump launched his latest non-fungible token collection on the solana blockchain in April and has been making increasingly bullish comments on crypto since then.
The Trump campaign team is accepting digital currency donations, and he has personally pledged to defend the rights of those who choose to self-custody their coins, meaning that they don’t rely on a centralized entity like Coinbase to hold their tokens and instead, do it themselves in personal crypto wallets, which are sometimes outside the reach of the Internal Revenue Service.
Trump also vowed at the Libertarian National Convention in Washington in May to keep Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and “her goons” away from bitcoin holders.
Meanwhile, following a meeting at Mar-a-Lago with about a dozen bitcoin mining executives who pledged cash and votes to him, Trump declared that all future bitcoin will be minted in the U.S., should he return to the White House.
On Monday, the Republican presidential nominee named Ohio Senator JD Vance as his running mate — a move viewed by many as a net win for the crypto sector. Vance has advocated for looser regulation of crypto and disclosed in 2022 that he personally holds bitcoin.
It comes in stark contrast to the Biden White House, which has taken a consistently skeptical approach to crypto regulation. Under Biden, the Securities and Exchange Commission has dialed up actions on the sector.
In the absence of hard-and-fast rules from Congress, the U.S. has proven to be one of the most active enforcers of penalties and legal challenges against crypto companies.
This election cycle, the crypto contingent has become a key pipeline for cash — and votes.
One day after Trump named Vance to his ticket, venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz told employees of Andreessen Horowitz that they plan to make significant donations to political action committees supporting Trump’s campaign.
“They’ve sued I think over 30 of our companies,” Horowitz said on an episode of “The Ben & Marc Show,” which features the a16z co-founders.
“They’re losing almost all these lawsuits, but the problem is that when you’re a startup, you don’t have the money to fight the U.S. government. And so they’re kind of nuking the industry in that way,” he said.
Fairshake, a super PAC backed by crypto’s top companies is now one of the top-spending PACs in this election cycle. Of the $160 million in total contributions it has raised, 94% can be traced back to just four companies: Ripple, Andreesen Horowitz, Coinbase and Jump Crypto.
In early June in San Francisco, technologists, crypto executives, and venture capitalists paid up to $300,000 per ticket to join a Trump fundraiser that ultimately raised more than $12 million.
Business
Denmark gets Novo Nordisk to lower Ozempic prices
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On May 13, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) published an open letter to Novo Nordisk on the front page of a leading Danish newspaper, urging the hometown company to live up to its altruistic standards by lowering U.S. prices for its blockbuster diabetes and weight loss drugs.
What Sanders didn’t realize was that Denmark, a country of 6 million, was enduring its own crisis over how to pay for the Novo Nordisk drugs Ozempic and Wegovy.
Most other developed countries, including Denmark, negotiate down drug costs for their citizens, paying prices that are a fraction of those in the United States. But when a drug is effective and expensive, pharmaceutical companies can play hardball on pricing. And Novo Nordisk did, at least initially, pushing the Danish health system to its limits.
The country’s socialized health system had for years covered Ozempic as a diabetes treatment, but in 2022 doctors began prescribing it for weight loss, too, and soon they “emptied all the money boxes in the entire public health system,” said University of Copenhagen professor Jens Juul Holst, a co-inventor of the drug.
Countries around the world are struggling with how and when to pay for Ozempic, Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro, and other drugs in the same chemical class, particularly when they are prescribed for weight loss. Indeed, the sky-high prices paid in the U.S. set a bar that pharmaceutical companies can use as they negotiate with other health systems.
In Denmark, with prescriptions for the drugs gobbling up 18% of regional drug budgets in 2023, officials were considering the unthinkable in a system that prides itself on free cradle-to-grave coverage: forcing patients to pay out-of-pocket for Ozempic — a drug made in the country.
In America, meanwhile, tightening insurance policies are making it harder for patients to get the drugs, which are listed at up to $1,350 a month.
“There are changes month to month in our clinic in terms of the supply, coverage, which drug is available,” said Michael Blaha, director of clinical research for the Johns Hopkins Ciccarone Center for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease. He said that doctors and patients were “playing a constant game of prior authorization and appeals.”
In particular, use of the drugs for weight loss is a hot-button issue. Novo Nordisk and Lilly are battling for coverage — joined by some doctors and patient advocate groups, many funded by the drug companies. They are pressing to overturn a 2005 federal rule that prohibits Medicare from reimbursing weight loss treatments.
“There’s a strong assumption that Medicare is going to cover these drugs for obesity treatment sooner or later,” said David Kim, an assistant professor of medicine and public health sciences at the University of Chicago. If Medicare pays, he added, commercial insurers will probably follow suit.
The impact on federal and commercial insurance budgets, he said, depends on three unanswered questions: How many people will eventually get the drugs? For how long will they take them? And at what price?
The potential Medicare market alone is enormous. In 2020 about 13.7 million Medicare beneficiaries, around a quarter of the total, were diagnosed as overweight or obese, according to Juliette Cubanski and Tricia Neuman, researchers at KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News. Assuming a 50% discount on a $1,300 monthly list price for Wegovy, that’s a $107 billion price tag. The entire federal share of Medicare Part D spending in 2024 was projected to be $120 billion.
Novo Nordisk spent $7.6 million lobbying Congress over the past 12 months, and lobbying disclosures show that most of that was to promote bills in the House and Senate to expand use of the GLP-1 drugs.
Pressure from drugmakers has been relentless. Pfizer, which has a GLP-1 drug in development, commissioned a white paper by consultancy Manatt arguing that Medicare law already allows payment for these anti-obesity drugs, since they have benefits beyond weight loss. Novo and other pharmaceutical companies have funded research that shows health care savings on chronic disease through use of the drugs.
But the Congressional Budget Office, whose judgments about the cost of such policies weigh heavily in whether they are eventually adopted, has yet to give a final opinion. In a March presentation, the office said it was “not aware of empirical evidence that directly links the use of anti-obesity medicines to reductions in other health care spending.”
Prime Therapeutics, a pharmacy benefit manager whose clients are employers that fund drug plans, released a study this year finding that only a third of patients put on a GLP-1 drug stayed on it for a full year. That means insurance coverage of the drugs could sometimes be a waste of money, said Patrick Gleason, Prime Therapeutics’ leader of research, since research shows that patients tend to gain the weight back after cessation.
That doesn’t completely surprise Holst, the Danish scientist, who said the GLP-1 drugs’ suppression of appetite is for many people “so miserably boring that you can’t stand it any longer and you have to go back to your old life.”
One answer might be weight loss programs that employ the GLP-1s for, say, a year, followed by maintenance therapy with cheaper drugs, Kim said.
One way or another, many experts in the field say, it’s sensible to cover weight loss before the onset of the chronic illnesses associated with obesity, like Type 2 diabetes.
Indeed, because obesity is associated with so many comorbidities, drugmakers are now doing studies showing that GLP-1 drugs also show positive impact on conditions like sleep apnea and heart, liver, and kidney diseases.
Yet even advocates for the drugs’ use acknowledge uncertainty about how long it would take for such health benefits to kick in, or whether shorter-term use would prevent or ameliorate longer-term illnesses.
“Modeling the impacts is complicated,” said Alison Sexton Ward, a research scientist at the University of Southern California’s Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics. “Medical costs won’t go down immediately. The prevented diseases may be years in the future.”
Starting next year, Medicare beneficiaries’ Part D out-of-pocket costs will be capped at $2,000, meaning U.S. taxpayers will foot the bill for most Medicare drug expenses. So it’s no surprise the Congressional Budget Office believes the government will launch Medicare price negotiations for semaglutide under the Inflation Reduction Act “within the next few years,” per its March presentation.
According to the terms of the act, Ozempic would be eligible for government price negotiation as early as next year, with new prices reflected in 2027. The negotiated unit price would apply to all forms of the drug — Ozempic; its higher-dose, weight loss-branded version, Wegovy; and a pill, Rybelsus.
Where the price would land is unclear. Wegovy costs patients up to $365 a month in Denmark, which typically doesn’t cover the drug — and about $140 in Germany and $92 in the U.K.
Meanwhile, generic drugmakers are gearing up to sell their versions of semaglutide. Those appear set to go on sale in China and Brazil as early as 2026. Americans are likely to have to wait until at least 2032 because of U.S. patent restrictions. The Federal Trade Commission has tried to nibble at the drugs’ exclusivity periods by challenging Novo Nordisk patent filings on applicators used to inject the drugs — which would extend their market exclusivity up to 30 months.
For now, patients who can’t afford or access the drugs often turn to compounded forms, which are not FDA-approved although their raw material comes from FDA-registered factories. Blaha has “a number of patients” who can’t access the branded drugs and show up at the clinic with compound drug vials.
Two weeks before Sanders published his letter in Denmark, Novo Nordisk cut the local price of Ozempic by 34%, to $130 a month — about 15% of its U.S. list price. The government, which had warned it would stop paying for the drug, agreed to cover Ozempic diabetes treatment, but only for patients who had first tried a cheaper medicine such as metformin.
Wegovy, the same medicine but at a higher dose, targeted to weight loss, would in nearly all cases remain the patient’s responsibility at $365 monthly, a price that, while modest by U.S. standards, has sparked intense discussions about the uneven impact of class on its affordability, said Nils Jakob Knudsen, an endocrinologist in Copenhagen.
The calculus of the drugs’ price is complex for the Danes, he added, because “the blooming economy for Novo is also driving our very healthy Danish economy.”
Novo Nordisk’s market valuation of $591 billion on Aug. 2 was considerably higher than the entire GDP of Denmark.
Business
Weekly mortgage refinance demand soars 16% as rates sink to lowest level in over a year
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An aerial view shows a subdivision that has replaced the once rural landscape in Hawthorn Woods, Illinois.
Scott Olson | Getty Images
Mortgage interest rates dropped last week to the lowest level since May 2023, causing a surge in mortgage demand from both homebuyers and especially current homeowners.
Total mortgage application volume rose 6.9% last week compared with the previous week according to the Mortgage Bankers Association’s seasonally adjusted index. Volume was at the highest level since January of this year.
The average contract interest rate for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages with conforming loan balances ($766,550 or less) decreased to 6.55% from 6.82%, with points decreasing to 0.58 from 0.62 (including the origination fee) for loans with a 20% down payment.
“Mortgage rates decreased across the board last week…following doveish communication from the Federal Reserve and a weak jobs report, which added to increased concerns of an economy slowing more rapidly than expected,” said Joel Kan, MBA’s vice president and deputy chief economist in a release.
Applications to refinance a home loan, which are most sensitive to weekly rate changes, jumped 16% for the week and were 59% higher than the same week one year ago. While the percentage increases are large, they are still coming off a very small base. The vast majority of borrowers today have loans with rates below 5%. There are less than one million borrowers who can benefit from a refinance and shave at least 75 basis points off their current rate.
Applications for a mortgage to purchase a home increased just 1% for the week but were still 11% lower than the same week one year ago.
“Despite the downward movement in rates, purchase activity only saw small gains, with an increase in conventional purchase applications offset by decreases in government purchase applications. For-sale inventory is beginning to increase gradually in some parts of the country and homebuyers might be biding their time to enter the market given the prospect of lower rates,” added Kan.
Mortgage rates fell further to start this week, following a stock market rout Monday. They rose sharply again, however, on Tuesday following some more positive economic data.
“This is how things often play out when the bond market forces a quick move to extreme rate levels. For example, several of the biggest drops in daily mortgage rates have followed quick moves to long-term highs,” wrote Matthew Graham, chief operating officer at Mortgage News Daily.
Business
Further rate cuts could fuel house price rises, says Halifax
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Lower mortgage rates and more interest rate cuts could fuel a “modest” rise in house prices for the rest of this year, Halifax has said.
The mortgage lender’s prediction came after property prices increased marginally in July following a flat few months.
Halifax said recent mortgage rate drops were “encouraging” for first-time buyers, those moving along the housing ladder or those refinancing.
But it warned affordability challenges and lack of available properties still posed problems for buyers.
“Against the backdrop of lower mortgage rates and potential further [Bank of England] base rate reductions, we anticipate house prices to continue a modest upward trend throughout the remainder of this year,” Amanda Bryden, head of mortgages at Halifax said.
Last week the Bank of England lowered interest rates to 5% – the first cut since the start of the pandemic in March 2020.
The Bank’s rate dictates the cost of borrowing set by High Street banks and money lenders for the likes of mortgages and credit cards.
The UK’s largest lender said a typical property cost £291,268 in July, up more than £2,200 compared to the previous month.
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